All posts tagged Taptu 1.5

Taptu 1.5 For Android Is Here: Supercharging Search and Delivering A Great New Interface

Posted by on June 10, 2011

Today we’re happy to share with you the latest release of Taptu for Android, or version 1.5 as its “officially” known. We’ve supercharged search to let you discover even more content and we’ve revamped the app’s interface creating what we think is a sharp new look, and giving you even more ways to customize the app.

So what have we done?

When you search for a stream, Taptu will now scan for both the topic of a stream AND for keywords within streams. This is especially useful when you’re searching by topic, rather than for something you’re specifically looking for.

For example, if you’re searching for “e. coli” you wouldn’t have originally got any streams on the deadly bacteria. Now, the app will give you our curated News and Headlines streams, since e. coli has been in the news, as well as MSNBC’s Health stream (with stories on how to protect yourself) and CNN’s International stream (since the news event originated in Germany).

It’s a great way to discover streams you might not have known even existed.

We’ve also added related article discovery to the Android app, which is becoming one of our most popular features on Taptu for iPad and iPhone. While you’re reading a popular story on Android now, you’ll be given a list of related stories from a similar source or similar topic.

As for the UI—we’re becoming known for the serious level of customization you can do with Taptu, especially for our feature ‘DJ the News’ which lets you mix and merge a number of streams into one.

We’ve added a few more features to take that customization even further:

1. You can now resize your streams to make them larger or smaller and color-code them to get organized. Individual streams can be quickly refreshed now by scrolling them to the right.
2. You’re a purist you say and you just want text? No problem! You can now hide photos or even choose how big or small they appear.
3. We’ve given the article pages a full makeover, serving up full-sized photos and bigger headlines.

We hope you enjoy the new enhancements to the app. Many of the feature upgrades have come from your suggestions, so please keep the feedback coming. If you need help with the app, feel free to ping us. You can reach us on @taptu on Twitter, our Facebook page, and our community support page. Thanks for trying out Taptu!

KP

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Taptu 1.5 for iOS available now: Sharp New UI and Instapaper Support

Posted by on June 2, 2011

Hello Taptu-ers,

Check out our newest update, available live now in the Apple iTunes App Store.

What’s new you ask? Well a new and improved, supercharged search experience for starters. After all, that’s at the heart of Taptu and what makes us so different. Our search tech and science is what powers the Taptu experience and something we’re super proud of. So let your hair down and go wild in the search box and type the stuff your seeking. We’ll return the results for any mention of it in any stream, and of course provide you new steams to add featuring the same query. So now, no matter what you’re searching for, whatever your into, Taptu will deliver you a stream to match your interests!

It’s probably worth taking a minute just to give you an example of how the search is different now. For example, if you’re into the Miami Heat (my favorite hometown team), searching for ‘LeBron James’ in the past would not return you streams that didn’t have a perfect match for the basketball player. But now, Taptu will display all suggested streams that include Taptu’s curated Basketball and Miami Heat streams as well as The Miami Herald’s Miami Heat blog and the Bleacher Report, since they all provide wide coverage of news related to James.

Improved search is not the only change we made for Taptu 1.5 for iOS. By popular demand, Taptu 1.5 brings some of our iPad version’s most popular features to the iPhone. At the touch of a button, you can easily resize streams to make them larger or smaller and get better organized with color-coded streams for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even your own bookmarked stories.

We didn’t stop there! We gave our article pages a facelift, delivering full-sized photos and bigger headlines on an updated layout.

Taptu 1.5 also adds related article discovery to the iPhone app so that you can get suggestions about other stories to read on the same issue across your news sources. This feature has quickly become one of your favorite things about Taptu and we wanted to deliver it across all our platforms. Best of all, you also find trending stories on the main home screen view of Taptu for stories appearing across multiple streams.


Last but not least, after listening to all of your amazing feedback @Taptu on Twitter, Facebook or our Community Support Pages, we’ve added Instapaper support for both iPad and iPhone, giving you the ability to archive articles to read later via your Instapaper account. So now, not only can you bookmark stories to read later inside Taptu, you can export them to Instapaper, too.

So check out our newest Taptu update on the App Store and take it for a test drive.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think!

Mitch

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